by J. Langland
“Is someone torturing a Ban Sidhe in there?” Ragala-nargoloth asked, covering her ears.
Tom followed his link to the command center. Vargg Agnoth was on duty. Suddenly, unconsciously on Tom’s part, the gateway shifted to the command center. Those standing in Astlan were suddenly peering through the portal directly into the command center.
“What is going on?” Tom shouted through the portal.
“Radar has detected a large incoming force from Doom’s Redoubt!” Vargg yelled back. “A very large force, easily twice as big as what we believed they had available.”
Tom clenched his teeth. He had been worrying about this exact situation—everyone hung over and passed out—and now the enemy was attacking! “Crap!” He looked to his shamans and wizards. “I have to return. You guys stay here; it will be far safer here.”
“Commander!” shouted some D’Orc that Tom did not immediately recognize. Darth Venstradt, he believed. “We are detecting signs of a Chaos Maelstrom!”
Vargg Agnoth cursed loudly, using some word that Tom did not recognize.
“What’s a Chaos Maelstrom?” Tom asked.
Vargg turned to stare at Tom, his face a very unusual pale shade of green. If Tom did not know that D’Orcs were incapable of fear, he would have sworn the commander was giving him a look of terror. “It means Lilith is sending in the Knights of Chaos!”
“Unholy flatulent monkeys of despair!” Antefalken moaned and rolled his head.
“What in the Abyss are Knights of Chaos?” Tom asked.
“They are enforcers, mercenaries, freelance knights. They are not demons, but something else, something worse, from the other end of the multiverse,” Antefalken said. “In legends they were occasionally employed by the Court to deal with rogue archdemons or rogue princes.” He shuddered. “I thought they were mere legend; they haven’t been deployed since the Great Demon Wars.”
“So, what? The extra troops are all Knights of Chaos?” Tom asked.
Vargg Agnoth made a very odd sound on the other side of the gateway.
Antefalken’s eyes popped open wide. “Concordenax forbid!” he exclaimed, his voice shaking slightly. “One Knight of Chaos is nearly a match for an archdemon!”
“Ouch! How many do we think she’ll send?” Tom asked.
“It takes at least thirteen to form a Maelstrom,” Vargg said. “And this looks like a big one.”
“Shit,” Tom sighed, feeling his stomach twist into knots.
~
Völund reached into a vest pocket and pulled out a small hand mirror. He tapped on it a couple of times, shouting “Command Center!” After a few seconds, someone apparently answered, as Völund shouted “What’s with the damn racket?” into the thing. He put the mirror to his ear to hear better, and then pulled it back to look in. “Then we’re going to need the heavy artillery. Phaestus and I will get on it!” he shouted and then put the mirror back in his pocket.
“What is it?” Phaestus yelled.
“Two thousand plus demons from Doom’s Redoubt and a Chaos Maelstrom,” Völund yelled back.
“A Chaos Maelstrom?” Phaestus shouted over the klaxons, looking at Völund in shock.
“A Chaos Maelstrom?” Talarius and Ruiden said in unison, looking at each other.
“Yes!” Talarius slammed his right fist into his left palm as the knight and his sword grinned like maniacs at each other.
“What’s a Chaos Maelstrom?” Reggie asked.
“It’s a dimensional rift, or disruption in reality that Knights of Chaos use to travel the planes,” Phaestus yelled over the klaxons.
“Knights of Chaos?” Boggy and Reggie yelled, both looking puzzled.
“A very bad thing!” Völund yelled.
Talarius turned to smile broadly at Reggie and Boggy. “Knights of Chaos are absolutely the most supremely EVIL creatures in the multiverse!” The knight shouted excitedly, shaking his fist before suddenly getting quite sober and grimacing apologetically as he realized whom he was speaking to. “Sorry! No offense intended…” He gestured towards the two demons. “I mean you two are extremely evil but…”
Boggy nodded. “No offense taken. I’m okay with being only moderately evil.”
Reggie nodded as well and said, “Yeah, we’re good—er, okay.”
Talarius nodded his thanks to the two demons for understanding that he had not intended to impugn their eviltude.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Talarius said, looking to Ruiden. “We must prepare! Are you stuck like that or can you change back?”
“I can change back, I think. I hope,” Ruiden said rather uncertainly; it was hard to hear the sword over the klaxons.
Phaestus jumped up and shouted to Völund, “You head to the tech armory to start getting the heavy artillery online. I’ll join you shortly.”
“Why not come now?” Völund asked.
“Knights of Chaos? Do you think my wife would ever forgive me if I did not tell her about this? Her reaction will be about the same as those two.” He gestured towards Talarius and Ruiden, shaking his head ruefully.
~
Not knowing what else to do and not wanting to be in the way in the command center, Reggie and Boggy followed Phaestus.
“So you’re going to contact your wife?” Reggie asked Phaestus over the roar of the klaxons.
Phaestus nodded and yelled back, “Yes. I’ll also open a gateway for her.”
“Where is she at?” Boggy yelled.
“She should be in Astlan.”
“So that’s where you live normally?” Reggie asked.
“Recently, yes. It’s where she and I have spent much of the last few hundred years. We have homes and I have workshops in several different worlds,” Phaestus replied at the top of his lungs. “Of course, now that Doom is back online, I will probably move a lot of my work back here. The resources are so much better here.” Phaestus grinned at them. “And other than the occasional invading demon army and Chaos Maelstrom, it’s much more secure.” The smith chuckled. “Actually, in fifty-two thousand years there was only one breach; admittedly a very big one. However, both Völund and I were off plane at the time, or things might have gone differently.” Phaestus frowned at the memory.
“That was a very big mistake. All four key players gone at the same time. One we shall not repeat,” the smith said inaudibly under the wail of the klaxons.
“So where are we opening this gate?” Boggy yelled as he followed the limping man down the hallways.
“The portal room!” Phaestus shouted.
“Where is the portal room?” Reggie asked. He did not remember any portal room.
“It’s off the Temple of Doom!” Phaestus shouted back.
Reggie’s eyebrows furrowed. He did not remember any portal room near the temple. He had not been there very often, but he thought he would have noticed it.
The three of them entered the temple and Phaestus headed to the wall behind the altar. The smith quickly began poking wall stones in some predetermined manner, and suddenly a doorway appeared in the formerly blank wall.
“Whoa! That’s new!” Reggie exclaimed.
Phaestus grinned at him. “No, it’s actually very old, but you have to know it’s here.” He led the way into another room of roughly the same size. The temple had been lit by a few magical braziers, but this room was dark until Phaestus waved his hands along the side walls, lighting the braziers in the room.
The first thing Reggie noted was that the room had a lot of cobwebs. These were the first cobwebs he had seen in the Abyss. “Are there spiders here? I’ve not seen any spiders in the Abyss before,” Reggie said.
“Nor have I!” Boggy shouted in puzzled agreement.
“They aren’t spider webs. They are D’Rachnid webs!” Phaestus pointed toward a very heavily cobwebbed corner between two columns. Reggie blinked to see the reddish light from the braziers reflecting off a couple of pairs of large, red orbs.
“D’Rachnid webs?” Boggy asked
nervously.
“Yeah. Think of them like the D’Orc equivalent of arachnids. Extremely poisonous bite to pretty much every living creature. Their saliva is acidic; hence all the pockmarks on the floor.” He gestured to the large number of tiny pits in the floors.
“So are we in danger?” Reggie asked loudly.
“Nah!” Phaestus shook his head. “They know me, they trust me. They are also linked to Mount Doom, so anyone linked to Tommus is safe, unless he doesn’t want them to be.” He turned to grin at the two demons. “They are here as a welcoming committee in the highly unlikely event someone manages to open the World Gate from some other side. Or more specifically, someone we don’t like opens the gate. I use them in most of my gate rooms.”
Phaestus walked to the center of the room, where a large stone tray sat on a smaller stone pedestal. The stone tray had a large array of different-colored crystals packed into it. The crystals were tightly arranged in a twelve-by-twelve array. There appeared to be a good-sized handprint indention on a smaller stone pad at the base of the crystals.
The array looked somewhat familiar, but Reggie cold not place it. He looked up from the array to the back wall of the chamber and blinked. There was a large set of concentric metal rings standing up against the wall. The rings were freestanding and carved with various runic symbols at various intervals around each one. The rings were supported by a large stand that held them at their base. A ramp allowed one to walk up smoothly to the top of the innermost ring. A large indicator that seemed to be made of the same colored metal as the base capped the top of the two rings. The indicator had a pointer to a symbol on the inner ring, and an opening to display the rune selected on the outer ring.
The rings looked even more familiar to Reggie than the tray of crystals. But it was different enough that he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen something like this. “So is that the World Gate?” he asked.
“It is,” Phaestus replied over the klaxons. He was busy rearranging the crystals in the array. Apparently they were removable and could be turned to different orientations so that different facets of any one crystal could connect with different facets of other crystals. “I need to concentrate for a few minutes,” the smith warned.
It took Phaestus a few minutes to get all the crystals arranged as he wished, but finally he seemed satisfied. He placed his right hand in the hand-shaped indentation below the tray. Suddenly there was a large screeching sound as metal that had not moved in nearly four thousand years began to move again.
Reggie looked up to see the two concentric rings rotating in opposite directions. The two rings spun around at different rates and then stopped briefly. As they stopped, a rune on the top ring lit within the indicator, as did the rune the indicator pointed to in the lower ring. After a brief pause, the rings started rotating again in the opposite directions, again at different rates of rotation so that they completed different numbers of rotations per ring before stopping on a new set of two runes.
Reggie suddenly realized it was like a double-combination lock. There was an inner combination lock that had to go around so many times to land on a specific rune, and the outer combination lock had to rotate the opposite way some other number of times to land on a different rune, the two runes matching up at the same time. Reggie shook his head trying to conceive of how many combinations there could be with all the various runes and different numbers of rations of the two rings.
Boggy and Reggie were mesmerized as the rotation continued for what seemed like several minutes. The screeching of the metal had been replaced by a deep humming, almost roaring noise and a very physical, bass-like throbbing of the air and stone of the room.
Finally, the rings came to a final set of runes and Phaestus removed his palm. Golden light flooded the chamber as a highly reflective pool of liquid gold appeared inside the two rings, perpendicular to the floor. Suddenly it was as if a giant stone had splashed into the center of the golden pool as the reflective liquid seemed to splash inward in a giant spike, with a surrounding counter ring splash coming back into the room. The roaring turned to a giant whistling and then died down into a sustained throbbing beneath the roar of the klaxons as the reflective pool became somewhat quiescent. Small waves rippled in the golden pool of light within the rings.
“A Star Gate?” Reggie had suddenly realized what the rings reminded him of.
“No, a World Gate; Star Gates are much simpler technology. Star Gates are basically very high-powered, long-distance Runic Gateways. A World Gate, on the other hand, can literally go anywhere in the multiverse where another World Gate is. Any distance in space, any distance in time, any distance in inter-planar space.” Phaestus grinned at them. “It can also connect to a Star Gate, of course, but it has to provide the power to keep the link open. A simple Star Gate can’t manage that; it can only act as a destination endpoint for a World Gate.”
“Blimey! You built this?” Boggy asked, impressed.
Phaestus shrugged. “Völund and I built this one. However, the technology was a joint venture by us, the Altrusian engineers who built the boom tunnels, and a few others.”
“Tizzy said that Sleestak wizards built the boom tunnels,” Reggie said. Boggy nodded.
Phaestus snorted in humor. “That’s what he calls them. And in some sense that is true. The Altrusians are the ancestors and descendants of the Sleestaks.”
“How can they be both?” Boggy asked, puzzled.
“Altrusians are temporally cyclical,” Phaestus said. “Meaning they exist at multiple points in time simultaneously in the past and the future. Not unlike the Mobius Mage, only on a much larger scale.”
“The Mobius Mage?” Reggie asked.
“You don’t want to know. He’s a pain in the ass.” Phaestus shook his head. “With luck, we will never need to discuss him—or rather, I guess, it—again.” Phaestus gestured to the World Gate.
“We should go through. Remember, we are about to be under attack from Knights of Chaos. If my wife misses that, things will be much worse than they are now.” Phaestus paused as he walked around the control stones. “At least for me.”
Phaestus moved towards the World Gate and motioned for the others to follow him. He walked up the ramp to the golden pool and walked through. Boggy gave Reggie an uncertain look; Reggie shrugged and stepped through as well. Boggy followed.
The world seemed to stretch, twist, reform. Reggie thought he might throw up, but as suddenly as the disorientation began, it seemed to end and he found himself on a ramp leading down into a very crowded workshop. He looked behind him and as expected, there was another World Gate with a golden liquid center, through which Boggy walked.
The best thing about the new location was the quiet. They could no longer hear the wail of the klaxons. “Whew. That’s a relief!” Boggy said, touching his ears. Phaestus grinned.
“So we are in Astlan?” Reggie asked.
Phaestus twisted his head around in a sort of wobbly motion. “Not exactly. We are on Uropia, the closer of the two moons of Astlan.”
Reggie’s eyes popped wide. “Your wife lives on the moon?”
“Well, one of the two moons. As the population grows, we will extend onto the other moon, Anuropia.” Phaestus then made a shushing motion with his fingers.
“Your presence here is a bit awkward, so we need to stay low-key. We did not come through the proper channels, and if certain individuals find out I have a back door that bypasses our normal security, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. Sekhmekt, my wife, knows about the World Gate, but very few others do.” Phaestus looked towards the door. “I am hoping she doesn’t have any visitors here in our villa at the moment.”
He gestured for them to follow him around a few tables and counters with a wide plethora of odd-looking instruments, tools and half-finished projects. He leaned up against the door to the workshop and seemed to concentrate on something, as if listening. He finally nodded.
“She’s in the den, and only our household servants a
re here.” He opened the door and gestured for them to follow him. The three left the workshop and proceeded down a large marble corridor with several good-sized columns all inlaid with gold, silver and other odd, gemstone-like tracings. Reggie felt like he was in a museum or a very fancy government building.
Phaestus led them to a doorway with a large red curtain, which he divided and said “Knock, Knock!” as he stuck his head through.
From the other side of the curtain a very deep, yet still feminine voice exclaimed, “pêTah! You are back from Mount Doom already?”
Phaestus moved into the room. “I am, my darling, and I have a couple of friends with me!”
“Well, show them in!” the woman’s voice said.
“Reggie, Boggy?” Phaestus called. The two demons went into the room. Reggie shook his head in surprise; the room was not what he was expecting. It was luxuriously decorated with rugs, carpets, ferns and all manner of fine furniture. It resembled nothing so much as a very high-end Victorian hunting den or lounge. However, rather than having a lion’s head on a wall, there was a twelve-foot-tall, extremely muscular yet voluptuous, human woman with the head of a lioness standing before a large chair.
“Boggy, Reggie, this is my wife, Sekhmekt,” Phaestus announced proudly, gesturing at each of them as he introduced them.
Reggie heard Boggy murmur behind him, “Wow, lucky bloke—seriously married up!”
Sekhmekt raised one eyebrow in surprise at the sight of the two demons. “To what do we owe this honor?”
Phaestus grinned. “Mount Doom is under attack!” he said almost gleefully.
The lioness scrunched her eyebrows in puzzlement. “You are not one to shy from battle, particularly when it involves one of your creations.”
“No,” Phaestus said with a chuckle. “I had to come get you!”
“Why?” The lioness seemed puzzled.
“Lilith is sending two thousand plus demons…” Phaestus said, and Sekhmekt shrugged, not that concerned, “…and a Chaos Maelstrom!”
The lioness’s brow relaxed as her eyes went wide. “A large one?”
